It's one of the biggest and most valuable rocks tumbling around the asteroid belt. Some people say the amount of metal in the exposed core of 16 Psyche is worth more than the entire economy of Planet Earth. There may even be gold there.
But Psyche is worth much more than its weight in gold to SpaceFab, a small satellite startup with the ultimate goal to build big things in outer space. To SpaceFab, resource rich M-type asteroids like Psyche are absolutely essential to sustaining a space-faring civilization. And if everything falls into place for this scrappy business, SpaceFab will be running space station shipyards on Psyche in the second half of the 21st century and building enormous planet-to-planet luxury liners Buzz Aldrin himself would be proud to pilot.
"My dream would be that we could build a space station that's large enough to spin and provide artificial gravity," said Randy Chung, co-founder and CEO of SpaceFab on an October Zoom call with Outerspaceland.
It's an audacious goal for a tiny company based out of Chung's home near Los Angeles, still working on its first deal to send small satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO). Chung is the first to admit his ultimate dream is many decades down the line even in the best of best case scenarios, but his company is making steady progress on advancing the technology required to start to make it happen. Besides, outer space is the perfect place for big dreams.
Eventually, it might even be possible for SpaceFab to build the "Cyclers" famous Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin once proposed for travel between Earth and Mars, Chung said. Cyclers are gigantic space stations that are constantly moving between two planets.
An Aldrin Cycler would make the trip from Earth to Mars in about five months, part of a 26-month round trip on the space station's never-ending journey, Aldrin explained in a 2005 Popular Mechanics article. It would take advantage of the gravitational fields of the planets to propel it along its interplanetary path, allowing it to use significantly less fuel than conventional spacecraft of similar size. A second "Semi-Cycler" would be optimized to make the trip from Mars back to Earth in eight months or less. Special "taxis" would shuttle people back and forth from the surface of Earth or Mars to the Cyclers, Aldrin said in the article.
"If you rocketed up to this Mars Cycler, you could live on the Mars Cycler for several months to get between Earth and Mars. And you could live in a radiation shielded environment with artificial gravity, live comfortably, grow your own crops, potentially," Chung added on the Zoom call. It's the stuff of science fiction, and it's exactly the kind of spacious space habitat Chung wants SpaceFab to be able to build eventually.
Chung and fellow SpaceFab co-founder Sean League said it makes the most sense to build huge sci-fi inspired structures like a Cycler out in the asteroid belt where raw materials are plentiful and designs can be more flexible. That's where SpaceFab comes in once its asteroid factories are operational.
"We can build things that you can't build on Earth. A lot of things have to be bulky and massive when you launch it from Earth" to handle the gravitational forces and vibrations from rockets, said League, VP of spacecraft development for SpaceFab on the same Zoom call. "But we can build very thin, minimalistic structures in space."
And it doesn't really make sense to build big space structures out of expensive material launched from Earth when there appears to be plenty of free metal floating around in the asteroid belt, League said.
Psyche, itself, appears from Earth to be a solid hunk of metal about the size of Massachusetts. If that's all true, once an asteroid shipyard is brought online, all of the main materials for very large space stations could easily come from a rock like Psyche. Then, it's all about coordinating the ultimate remote work operation.
"Everything's automated. So, all of the people designing it are here on Earth. They're using Zoom and their PCs to go design this thing. It's the robots that are out at the asteroid that are actually building it," Chung said. "So, you could build something very, very large. Something that you couldn't economically build here on Earth."
A spinning space station and the shipyard that builds it are still several huge leaps away for what is essentially a pre-revenue company, but SpaceFab has a plan to baby-step and bootstrap itself all the way to the asteroid belt. The company is working hard to perfect its first products to ensure they cash-flow from the start.
A cornerstone of the plan is the Viewpoint satellite. SpaceFab is taking feedback from potential customers in order to design pound-for-pound, dollar-for-dollar the most useful optical machine in LEO when the fridge-sized telescope is finally boosted into space. The launch of the first Viewpoint on a SpaceX Falcon 9 could come as soon as late 2022, Chung said.
SpaceFab has considered several options to fund its first satellites, Chung said. Originally, the company had planned to finance Viewpoint's initial launch through venture capital and grow a constellation of telescopes from a single seed satellite. SpaceFab would sell "space selfies" and observation time by the minute on the first Viewpoint to help fund the next satellite and then the next, until the company had its own mighty money-making swarm of satellites that could help bankroll SpaceFab's larger asteroid ambitions.
Now, SpaceFab is exploring partnerships with larger customers, companies that might want to buy satellites in bulk. They would help with manufacturing and launch costs and would jointly operate the satellites with SpaceFab, Chung said. That could be a faster way to build up a profitable satellite operation.
Still another option is for SpaceFab to sell other services to fund its first satellites. SpaceFab's patent-pending "omni-material" 3D printing technology could be ready to demonstrate as soon as Spring 2021, Chung said. 3D printing could very well become a key source of early revenue for SpaceFab.
What's the best way for SpaceFab to get to the next step on the way to its ultimate destination in the asteroid belt? That is the question at the heart of every decision at the company.
Asteroid mining is the vision that drives everything at SpaceFab. Making money on every step towards that goal helps ensure SpaceFab controls its own destiny, Chung said.
A lot of space companies rely heavily on government contracts and the whims of NASA to steer their businesses. It can knock them off course. SpaceFab's model, on the other hand, is more like the one at SpaceX, Chung said.
"SpaceX is happy to get revenue from the U.S. government if it's aligned with what they want to do, but they're also perfectly happy to go their own way. They have their own vision, which is to go to Mars... They're gonna build their Starship Super Heavy whether the U.S. government wants it or not," Chung said. "So, we'd be happy to provide stuff to the U.S. government and get money that way, but whether the U.S. government wants to mine asteroids or not, we want to."
"Every launch we have to make money on. I mean, everything we're gonna do, we have to have a return on investment. That way we can keep the chain going," League said.
Much like SpaceX, SpaceFab is carving out several different potential profit paths for itself. SpaceFab is developing products that seem to have nothing to do with one another at this early stage other than their potential to make money. But they'll become foundational pillars of any successful future asteroid operation.
"Yeah, I think we're already being accused of doing too many things," Chung said with a chuckle. He and League talked with Outerspaceland about three of SpaceFab's bigger projects on the October Zoom call.
There's the flagship Viewpoint satellite, which could be the key to everything. In its current configuration, the star-gazing SmallSat is stuffed with a range of state-of-the-art cameras capable of seeing ultraviolet supernovas, hyper-color farm fields and very small things on the surface of Earth, according to SpaceFab's website. Viewpoint will have up to 40 cm ground resolution when pointed at Earth, Chung said.
Then, there's SpaceFab's innovation in ion engine technology. An ion engine produces a charged beam to propel spacecraft through the vacuum of space. They're well suited for long trips, because they don't need much fuel. But ion engines are also kind of slow. In September, SpaceFab was awarded a full utility patent for its Modular Beam Amplifier, which is designed to speed them up.
The amplifier could use solar energy, microwaves or even lasers to increase the thrust of a typical ion engine, and the technology should be scalable to enhance even the largest ion engines, League said.
And, of course, SpaceFab has its 3D printer project. Chung said SpaceFab's omni-material printer will be a very unique additive manufacturing product, capable of fusing all kinds of plastics, metals and ceramics together in a single print.
Even though these projects seem wildly different, a second glance reveals how complimentary they actually are, especially with SpaceFab's long-term goal of asteroid mining and manufacturing in mind.
Viewpoint satellites could become future asteroid landers. Structural, communications, optical and computer components from Viewpoint satellites would all be useful for a future lander, League said. Viewpoint could also be used to test 3D printing in space and to further develop SpaceFab's Modular Beam Amplifier for ion engines, he said.
Viewpoint satellites and future landers could be manufactured more efficiently using SpaceFab's omni-material 3D printer. For example, the ability to seamlessly print several different materials together could eliminate the need for problematic and costly fasteners on larger spacecraft, Chung said. Of course, advanced omni-material 3D printing technology is also crucial to any remote robotic manufacturing on an asteroid.
Finally, ion engines enhanced by a working Modular Beam Amplifier would be useful for quickly and efficiently getting SpaceFab's landers out to the asteroid belt and sending manufactured goods back to Earth. Ion engines can, in theory, easily be refueled at an asteroid using material from the asteroid, because they require such a small amount of fuel, League said.
While SpaceFab works to develop and test its own tech, the company could get help from outside sources to reach its final destination. Future ground-breaking successes of big players like SpaceX, Blue Origin and NASA could give SpaceFab the boost it needs to reach the asteroid belt and Psyche faster than it otherwise would.
Chung said he can imagine a scenario where a SpaceFab lander hitchhikes to Mars on a SpaceX Starship, for example, cutting the time and energy it would take the lander to get all the way to the asteroid belt by itself. Once kicked out of the Starship at Mars, the SpaceFab lander could use the gravity of Mars to slingshot the rest of the way to Psyche. It's a plan that would conserve precious fuel that the lander could use to get mined asteroid material back to Earth.
"We think it's likely that SpaceX or Blue Origin will be sending rockets up to Mars, let's say, between 2025 and 2030," Chung said. This timeline assumes a lot, and it's unclear if a company like SpaceX would be open to a Mars rideshare arrangement.
However, SpaceX has given no reason to doubt its ambitions to start sending at least unmanned Starships to Mars by the middle part of this decade. SpaceX is cycling through generations of prototypes at lightning speed, and it already has a full-size upper-stage Starship prototype on the pad in Boca Chica, TX ready for a 15km flight test, which could happen as soon as November 30 this year.
Also, SpaceX already has a rideshare program for SmallSats on its Falcon 9 rockets. That rideshare program dramatically dropped the costs for launching SmallSats like Viewpoint.
In fact, it's a primary reason SpaceFab shifted plans away from its Waypoint CubeSat to focus on the much larger and more capable Viewpoint SmallSat. The launch costs for each suddenly became roughly the same, Chung said.
According to SpaceX's website, Starship will have a mind-boggling 100 metric tons of cargo capacity. Assuming it's not absolutely filled to the brim with luggage going to Mars, there may be room for a stowaway lander that, according to Chung, would weigh roughly 1 to 2 metric tons.
Then, there's the highly anticipated NASA plan to launch a probe in 2022 to study Psyche. That mission would save SpaceFab the time and trouble of sending its own exploratory probe to scan for metals and scout landing sites. NASA's Psyche probe won't reach the asteroid until 2026, but SpaceFab is happy to wait on the results from the NASA mission before launching its own mission to the belt. There are too many important things to learn from the NASA probe, Chung said.
"It may actually be useful to know if other asteroids have hit that asteroid," Chung said, giving an example. An area on Psyche that was impacted by another asteroid might have a mixture of different materials present. It would be an ideal place to land one of SpaceFab's first robotic missions that will start building the base for what could eventually become the Psyche shipyard, he said.
If it launches from Earth in 2026, and if it takes several years for it to reach the asteroid belt, SpaceFab's first lander won't reach Psyche until the early 2030s. From that point on, with regular supply missions, an asteroid operation could grow exponentially, maybe doubling its production capacity every four years or so, Chung said. At that rate, 40 or 50 years from now, there could very well be a shipyard on Psyche.
"That's kind of the end goal. How do we make it from the first step of, we're gonna put this little lander on the asteroid, to now we've got a factory that's big enough to build another factory. And then, now it's an orbital factory. And now it's a shipyard. And now it can build billion dollar objects that people will actually pay for," Chung said.
"The mighty oak grows from a little acorn."
Editor's note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that a SpaceFab lander would weigh "a mere 200 kg" as a potential payload on a SpaceX Starship traveling to Mars. That weight was an assumption made by the author based on an estimation given by Randy Chung for SpaceFab's Viewpoint satellite (not an asteroid lander) in the interview for this article. Chung followed up via email after this article was published to point out the mistake. He mentioned in his email that "an asteroid lander would be more like 1 to 2 metric tons." The mistake was corrected in this article on 12/4/2020, the day it was brought to the author's attention. Outerspaceland regrets the error.
Adam created Outerspaceland to tell the stories of dreamers and to live through all of the brilliant people who push the boundaries of everything that's possible. Contact him at outerspacelander@gmail.com or @Ospaceland on Twitter.
Disclosure: Adam was one of 200 individual investors who invested in SpaceFab through a Wefunder equity crowdfunding campaign that closed in 2018.